Re: virtual consoles unresponsive
On Wed, Jun 23, 2004 at 10:26:27AM -0700, Carl D. Blake wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-06-23 at 08:48, Carl D. Blake wrote:
> > I've lost the ability to switch virtual consoles on my Woody system.
> > One of the sysadmins logged in as the backup user through the kdm
> > desktop and when he logged out the monitor went dark. Now we can't
> > switch to a virtual console using Ctrl-Alt-Fn, nor can we switch to the
> > kdm desktop with Ctrl-Alt-F7. I've seen something like this happen on
> > other linux systems before and my only solution was to reboot. I hate
> > to do that for something so stupid. Is there some way to restore this
> > functionality with rebooting the system?
> >
> >
> I've done some more investigation. It appears that something has
> happened to the video system. I can press Ctrl-Alt-F1 and then type in
> the username and password and when I check from an SSH connection I can
> see that I have successfully logged in on tty1. But I can't see
> anything on the console screen. I then pressed Ctrl-Alt-F7 and then
> pressed Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart the X server. When I did that the
> monitor's LED light went green for a moment as if it were about to
> display some video, but then it went orange again indicating that there
> was no video. Again I have seen this behavior before where the video
> system is somehow munged. Does anyone know how to fix it without
> rebooting? This is a server being used by other people and I really
> hate to take it down.
If you can log in, try to issue the command `reset' (without the
quotes), even if you can't see what you type. Hopefully this will set
the terminal to a sane state. You might also want to look for utilities
which set the video card and or the keyboard to a sane state.
Unfortunately I don't remember how exactly to locate them. You might
want to start with google, and/or svgalib.
--
"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then
you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I
have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two
ideas." -- George Bernard Shaw (sent by shaulk @ actcom . net . il)
Reply to: